1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an Internet enabled system for monitoring call conditions on a telecommunications network, and more specifically is directed toward a system and a method for interactive reporting of network events, including alarms and other network conditions affecting a customer""s telecommunication service, directly to a customer.
2. Background Art
Customers of major telecommunications services have in the past relied upon their telecommunications carriers to identify network problems and take corrective measures. Typically, common carriers conduct a continuous fault monitoring process throughout their networks to identify, locate and correct conditions which adversely affect voice and data lines, after which, the common carriers make the obtained fault information, i.e., information regarding network events, available to the customers of various leased facilities. The customers may then take some corrective measures to mitigate faults that occur over the leased services.
In conventional customer enabled network event monitoring systems, a connection is made with a large legacy system via a dial-up connection from a customer owned personal computer or workstation. This connection frequently, although not always, emulates a terminal addressable by the legacy system. The dial-up access requires custom software on the customer workstation to provide dial-up services, communication services, emulation and/or translation services and generally some resident custom form of the legacy application to interface with the midrange or mainframe computer running the legacy system.
There are several problems associated with this approach. First, the aforementioned software is very hardware specific, and customers generally have a wide range of workstation vendors, which requires extensive inventory for distribution, and generally, intensive customer hand holding through initial setup and installation before reliable and secure sessions are possible. If the customer hardware platform changes through an upgrade, most of these issues need renegotiation.
Second, dial-up modem and communications software interact with each other in many ways which are not always predictable to a custom application, requiring extensive troubleshooting and problem solving for an enterprise desiring to make the legacy system available to the customer, particularly where various telephone exchanges, dialing standards or signal standards are involved.
Third, when an enterprise desires to make more than one system available to the customer, the custom application for one legacy system is not able to connect to a different legacy system, and the customer must generally logoff and logon to switch from one to the other. Moreover, the delivery technologies used by the two legacy systems may be different, requiring different interface standards, and different machine level languages may be used by the two systems, as for example, the 96 character EBCDIC language used by IBM, and the 127 character ASCII language used by contemporary personal computers.
Finally, the security and entitlement features of the various legacy systems may be completely different, and vary from system to system and platform to platform. It is, therefore, desired to provide connectivity to enterprise legacy systems over the public Internet, as the Internet provides access connectivity world wide via the TCP/IP protocol, without need to navigate various telephone exchanges, dialing standards or signal standards.
One such type of legacy system for the telecommunications industry is known as a fault or alarm management system which can provide a range of services, including fault information regarding network events, to the customers of the enterprise. The delivery of information relating to these service problems, to the department or location within a customer""s organization that is responsible for managing their leased facilities, would permit the customer to analyze various fault conditions and traffic patterns within their portion of the network and to manage these facilities more economically. However, providing individual telecommunications management information to telecommunications customers is complicated by the fact that different customers lease different types of services, precluding a xe2x80x9cone size fits allxe2x80x9d solution to network management.
Thus, what is needed is a system and a method for allowing customers of leased telecommunications services to remotely access information pertaining to performance at their facility. This remote access must enable a customer to seamlessly view near real-time custom events specific to the services leased by a telecommunications customer. Customers further desire an open access route to this information. The rapid adoption and wide use of the Internet for data exchange has compelled a desire on the part of customers to access their data over the Internet.
The present invention is one component of an integrated suite of customer network management and report applications using the Internet and a World Wide Web (xe2x80x9cWWWxe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9cWebxe2x80x9d) Web browser paradigm. Introduced to the communications industry as the xe2x80x9cnetworkMCI Interact,xe2x80x9d the integrated suite of Web-based applications provides an invaluable tool for enabling customers of a telecommunications enterprise to manage their telecommunication assets, quickly and securely, from anywhere in the world.
The popularity of the public Internet provides a measure of platform independence for the customer, as the customer can run his/her own Internet Web browser and utilize his/her own platform connection to the Internet to enable service. This resolves many of the platform hardware and connectivity issues in the customer""s favor, and lets the customer choose their own platform and operating system. Web-based programs can minimize the need for training and support since they utilize existing client software, i.e. a Web browser, which the user has already installed and already knows how to use. Moreover, there is no longer a need to produce and distribute voluminous hard copies of documentation including software user guides. Further, if the customer later changes that platform, then, as soon as the new platform is Internet enabled, service is restored to the customer. The connectivity and communications software burden is thus resolved in favor of standard and readily available hardware and the browser and dial-up software used by the public Internet connection.
An Internet delivered paradigm obviates many of the installation and configuration problems involved with initial setup and configuration of a customer workstation, since the custom application required to interface with the legacy system can be delivered via the public Internet and run within a standard Web browser, reducing application compatibility issues to browser compatibility issues.
For the enterprise, the use of off-the-shelf Web browsers by the customer significantly simplifies the enterprise burden by limiting the client development side to screen layouts and data presentation tools that use a common interface enabled by the Web browser. Software development and support resources are thus available for the delivery of the enterprise legacy services and are not consumed by a need for customer support at the work station level.
The present invention is an event monitor application system for providing customers with various reports and information relating to their dedicated voice and data networks in real time or near-real time, and allowing them to make informed network management decisions in controlling their business telecommunications networks. The event monitor application of the present invention provides an integrated Web-based graphical, user-friendly interface to receive information on the performance of their dedicated voice and data networks, by presenting physical and logical network configuration, physical and logical network alarms, and physical and logical performance information pertaining to the circuits which comprise customers"" dedicated voice and data networks, on a real time or a near-real time basis. Thus, via the Web-based interface, customers may monitor their dedicated voice and data circuits, receive network alarms on degraded or broken circuits, and devise immediate and efficient troubleshooting procedures accordingly.
Using the Web-based graphical user interface (GUI), customers may also define or display customized troubleshooting procedures for specific alarms or circuits, and define or display customized alarm filters to specify which alarms may appear in the alarm presentation. Customers may also access via the Web-based GUI a database of their monitored facilities, e.g., dedicated voice and data circuits. In addition, with the present invention, customers may display and/or print lists of active alarms, as well as generate reports about network performance via their Web-enabled workstation.
For providing a system and a method for communicating information relating to the dedicated voice and data networks, from an enterprise to a customer at a client workstation, the present invention includes a client browser application located at the client workstation. The client browser application enables interactive Web-based communications with the event monitor system and also provides an integrated interface to the various enterprise application services. The client browser application invokes a Java application/applet specifically for performing the event monitor functionality. Via the event monitor Java application/applet, customers may define and display reports associated with the derived alarms and the performance statistics at the client terminal.
At the enterprise location, the present invention includes various systems for collecting statistics on performance of the dedicated voice and data network and deriving performance alarms based on the performance statistics. A server system is included to receive and store the performance statistics and the derived alarms from the collecting systems. Accordingly, using the present invention, customers with workstations having generic Web browsers, for example, the Internet Explorer 4.0, may receive, view, and monitor various alarms and performance statistics relating to their dedicated voice and data network.
Further features and advantages of the present invention as well as the structure and operation of various embodiments of the present invention are described in detail below with reference to the accompanying drawings. In the drawings, like reference numbers indicate identical or functionally similar elements.